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Maye et al. have found a neurally (and genetically) based fractal order underlying the generation of spontaneous behavior. Their finding is undoubtedly important in understanding the mechanisms generating adaptive behavior and the authors have been cautious in their interpretations within the article, but less so in discussions with the press.

One co-author writes: “the term ‘will’ would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be ‘free’ if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity – which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie.”

The findings actually have nothing to do with free will. Free will is a feeling I have (when I do something deliberately) that I am doing what I am doing because I feel like it: a feeling that my willing it is the cause of my doing it.

It is undeniably true that that is what it feels like to do something deliberately. But whether what feels like the cause — feeling — is indeed the cause of my doing is an entirely different matter, especially if we are not ready to believe in telekinesis. The real cause might, for example, be a fractal order mechanism of the kind reported by Maye et al. But that mechanism is the causal mechanism it is irrespective of whether it happens to be accompanied by (or generates) feelings. And it certainly does not explain how or why we (let alone the fruit fly) feel anything at all.

And without feeling there is no free will, just mechanisms, whether deterministic or nondeterministic.

Stevan Harnad

Harnad, S. (2003) Can a Machine Be Conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4-5): 69-75.

Harnad, S. (2005) What Is Consciousness. New York Review of Books 52 (11).

So first you do an online-age patent search to check whether your neologism or aphorism has been logged or phored afore.

Googling “food as an appetite suppressant” only nets two mentions, neither the intended one:

“…reduces the desire to eat more food. As an appetite suppressant supplement, pinolenic acid…”

“…sprinkle nail polish remover on your food as an appetite suppressant…”

But is it discovery or dysphoria to inisist that food as an appetite suppressant was the intended insight?

Fool. If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I’ld have thee beaten for being
old before thy time.

Lear. How’s that?

Fool. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Aging is morphing
into a grotesque caricature
of oneself

Are all traits, distilled,
disgusting?

Or do some percolate
into perfection?

Kriszti, ma szabadultál meg.
Nagypéntek mátol kezdve a te napod is lesz,
ahogy a Mátyás Passzió már mindig is a tiéd volt.
וְשִׁירָתָא תֻּשְׁבְּחָתָא וְנֶחֱמָתָא

Is pledging the non-recurrence of a counterfactual condition casuistry, or just diplomacy?

Going postal has been enfranchised, technologically “empowered.” Now anyone with a grievance, righteous or wrongful, can register his displeasure with a vengeance, on a scale unprecedented, unimagined. Jilted? Blow up her wedding party. Underpaid? Sprinkle Eboli in their staff canteen. Overtaxed? Cyber-raid the IRS’s pantry. Losing Pascal’s Wager? Post Polonium-210 to the infidels (and anyone else along the paper trail). And if all else fails, or you’re in an especial rush, strap on a boom-belt and take out the nearest crowd. ‘At’ll teach ’em.

According to Wired, Marvin Minsky claims in “The Emotion Machine” that “anger, love, and other emotions are types of thought, not feeling.”

In fact it’s exactly the reverse. Thoughts are a kind of feeling (namely, what it feels like to be processing certain information: understanding X, meaning Y, believing Z).

And there’s a world of difference between the two positions. Saying that feeling is just a kind of thinking (i.e., information-processing state) is saying nothing, because the fact that it is felt is precisely what makes whatever kind of “information-processing state” thought is different, and in special need of explanation.

In contrast, saying that thinking is a kind of feeling — though it certainly doesn’t explain feeling! — makes it quite clear that it’s not just feeling pinches and seeing pink that need explanation, but also thinking X.

Hence “thinking” cannot be used as an unexplicated bootstrap for explaining feeling: Just exactly what sort of thing conscious “thinking” is — as opposed to mere unconscious data-crunching — is part of the problem, not the solution!

Zounds, how insouciant people can be, in the ways they keep begging this particular question! Sometimes they don’t have the faintest understanding (only the feeling of understanding).

Which is yet another interesting property of cognition: There’s saying 2+2=4, understanding “2+2=4”, believing that “2+2=4” — and then there’s the further matter of whether 2+2 does indeed equal 4 (or whether snow is white, or F=ma, or april showers indeed bring may flowers…).

See: Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.

Verse should converse, inspire, muse,
not just encipher, perplex, bemuse.

Rhyme doesn’t matter nor metre nor trope, really, but,

foremost of all, to hope to be good,
never should verse endeavour to should.

Papal fallibility has come a long way when we have four apologies in a fortnight for having spoken ill of a prophet buried 15 centuries ago, whereas it took 5 decades and 5 popes to apologise for having allowed six million to be incinerated without a murmur of papal protest.